Ponder This
by Tearlit
Summary: There are things we all hide, things we all refuse to utter out loud, refuse to dwell on too much. Sarah Connor is no exception. A series of drabbles and short pieces.
1. Chapter 1

Disclaimer - Not mine.

A/N - So what do you think?

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Sarah stood as the nurse beckoned to her, softly brushing her fingers along her son's hair and trying not to think on what she was about to do.

"Wait here, I'll be out in a while, all right?"

He looked up from his picture book and nodded. "Are you sick, mommy?"

"No, John."

Sarah followed the nurse into a small room and dressed in the cheap paper gown. As the woman lay back on the cold table and waited for the doctor she felt the hands of irony - she was killing one child so that she could protect another.


	2. Chapter 2

Disclaimer - Not mine.

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Sarah gave up everything for her son. Everything. Sometimes, late at night as she lay cold and alone in her bed, she wished that he had never been born. That terminators were just a figment of her imagination. That Kyle Reese was a man she had met at a diner, not a solider from a future manipulated by her son. That there was no Skynet or Judgment Day or aliases and that she had been allowed to be a normal woman. And she hated herself for that because she loved Kyle and she loved John and normal was overrated anyway.


	3. Chapter 3

A/N - Spoilers for season 2's The Tower is Tall but the Fall is Short.

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Sarah could no longer bear to look into the eyes of her own son. She was afraid of what she would see there, of what she _had_ seen there. Sadness mingled with the fear…as long as she avoided catching his gaze with her own she could pretend - pretend that he was still her little boy, that he was still dependent on her, that he still had kind eyes so much like his father, that he hadn't killed a man. Then his eyes met her own and her lies washed away, leaving her grasping for something solid to cling to.


	4. Chapter 4

John Connor was a colicky baby. He would cry and cry and cry, never ending panicky breathless wails that seeped inside her head and echoed for hours after they finally stopped. The dirt floor of the hut they were staying in now bore a track made by Sarah's feet as she paced endlessly around and through it night after night. Finally in the wee hours of the morning she would collapse on the edge of the rough hewn stump that served as a chair, one hand cradling her tiny son, the other clutching her stomach, tracing the inflamed stitches that marred her skin. As soon as the movement ceased the cries would grow in volume until Sarah thought her eardrums would burst from the piercing howls.

Unable to make her tired legs move another inch, she would attempt to rock him, back and forth, back and forth on the unyielding piece of wood. Her mind would trace familiar paths, much as her feet did, and she would always end up on thoughts of Kyle Reese. During these long nights she came to the realization that Reese did not love her. She was an unwed mother, an ex waitress, a college drop out. She loved 80's music and dancing and big hair. He loved a soldier, a fighter, someone who would sacrifice anything and everything to protect one person - the one cradled in her arms. He loved someone who knew how to do perfect field dressings and clean guns, someone who could survive anything. He loved who she would be. He loved the ghost of a woman who did not yet exist.

Once the cries reached a fevered pitch she would laboriously rise to her feet and return to the familiar circuit in the floor. As the twilight in the hut began to diminish with the rising sun the baby would finally quiet and drift to sleep. Her own sobs were left to echo hollowly in her ears.


	5. Chapter 5

Disclaimer - Not mine.

A/N - Spoilers for The Good Wound.

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"_A visionary is one who can find his way by moonlight, and see the dawn before the rest of the world_." - Oscar Wilde

Kyle Reese was always with her, an ever present ghost that haunted her waking hours with his words of the future, with his warnings, with his knowledge of who her son would one day be. He walked nightly through her dreams, cradling her in his arms, trailing his fingers through her hair, sweeping his lips along her body. She thought of what he would do as she trained her son, as she found people to train her. Everything she did was for both of them.

She pushed him from her mind when she used her body to get her way, to obtain a new set of skills for John. She could not let Kyle Reese haunt her then, because she was afraid of the imagined look on his face, was afraid of what he would think of her if he knew.

As John grew from a baby to a toddler to a child to a teen she did more and more for him. Gave up so much of herself that one day she couldn't remember who she once was. But she never lost him, never lost Reese. As she rotted in the mental hospital he was with her, as she fought for her son he was with her. And she knew, from the time the bullet was lodge so deep in her leg, that when she died…he would be with her then too.


End file.
